The Road Taken, One Word etc

Friday, 24 April 2015

MY DADU book of poems

A COLLECTION OF POEMS DEDICATED

To my
grandfather

who did
not know

old age

by

Anuradha
Bhattacharyya

Dr. Anuradha
Bhattacharyya is the granddaughter of late Professor Asoke Kumar Bhattacharyya, who has been awarded Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2017 posthumously. He was an art historian and author of more than thirty books written over more than
thirty five years, ever since his retirement in 1975 from the position of
Director, Indian Museum, Kolkata. The same year she was born. She has seen her
grandfather only in his personal residence in Lake Gardens after he shifted
there from the official residence inside the Museum premises. The frequent
visits to her grandparents’ have formed deep impressions on her. They have not
only formed her character but also shaped her theory of life. This is her
fourth book of verse.

Dr. Anuradha
Bhattacharyya is author of three books of verse, Fifty Five Poems
(1998), Knots (2012) and Lofty – to fill up a cultural chasm
(2014), all published by WRITERS WORKSHOP, Kolkata. Presently, she is Assistant
Professor in English at Postgraduate Government College, Sector-11, Chandigarh
since 2006. She lives with her husband and daughter. This is the eighth city
she has lived in. She has had spent parts of her childhood in Durgapur,
Roorkee, Jaipur and Kolkata. For her education she has been at Kharagpur as
well as Mumbai. For work she has been at New Delhi, teaching in a Management
Institute before coming to Chandigarh as this is a UPSC position. Her myriad
experience and a keen observation of the habits of the people of all these
diverse parts of India allow her a complex trapeze of expressions. Her novel One Word has been awarded BEST BOOK of the year 2016 by Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi.

Published poetry books

Twentieth Century European Literature

The Lacanian Author

International Visibility

About the author

I was in school when I discovered my hands itching to hold a pen and write. By then I had read all of Enid Blyton and graduated to the series of fictional sleuths. It started with a personal diary.

In those days I was a strict believer. I used to pray to god for everything. But I was very lazy. In my personal religion, there was no place for an orthodox routine. I assumed god to be someone just like me.

I started writing poetic lines in my diary. There used to be a school magazine where I frequently contributed. The most famous one was published as written by ‘anonymous’. I was not happy. In the same issue I came across a short story which had won the President’s award.

I was brought up by educated parents; my grandparents and one of my great-grandfathers were all educationists. I was treated as a pupil in the house.

My poems leapt out of the diary pages and took shape in experimental forms. I expressed my fears and disappointments in them and they were never appreciated at home. I guarded my file of poems savagely.

Getting an education of my choice was a struggle. My parents decided things for me: which school, which university, which institute. It was all beyond my power and I was sent to those places with the challenge to pass. But, no regrets! I got my choice of subject.

I passed and entered the job arena. By then I must have read a thousand books: novels, poems, biographies, histories and philosophies.

I came across Freud at the age of 21 years. From then on my only quest was to find his books and read all of them. I visited libraries, borrowed books and kept them beyond due dates, for I had to reread those difficult essays and finally form an idea of what Freud had to say.

Till now, I have properly formulated only one basic idea of Freud’s work: More than 80% of it is child psychology.

The secondary reading on Freud irritated me. After completing my PhD thesis, I abandoned psychoanalysis. I found every literary theory stifling my imagination. It was too much theory and very little life. It was like too much protein and very little oxygen in my blood.

A little distancing is necessary for forming new combinations. I went back to reading novels and plays. The poems appeared with greater force. Though Freud is sprinkled over all my compositions, I have never referred back to any of his texts.

What I am today is definitely a product of my education, the academic fields I have been through. But I am now quite distanced from my immediate influences. My first impulse to write was not dictated by my learning. It was spontaneous and out of love for words and forms. Now I write just like that.

I observe life and pen down my thoughts. I seek in my heart for alternatives to things that I don’t like in my surroundings and pen them down. I revise my writings to be more communicative. I do not release a work in public until I am happy with the finished product.

It gives me immense satisfaction, having written this fragment of revelation in my blog.